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December 17, 2008

CS4 color picker now does CMYK

Responding to reader feedback, developer Anastasiy Safari has added CMYK support and other tweaks (e.g. resizability) to the color picker panel I mentioned the other day. Way to go, Anastasiy!

You can download the panel here, unzip the file, and then drag the contents of the file into your "Adobe Photoshop CS4/Plug-Ins/Panels" directory. (Don’t forget to delete the old one if you installed it earlier.) After you relaunch Photoshop CS4, the panel will appear under Window->Extensions.

Oh, and–indulging my inner 8-year-old for a second–to all those folks who were spraying bile at the idea of Flash panels not so long ago: "You like apples? Well how do you like them apples?". ;-)

Comments

wolfpuncher — 8:02 AM on December 17, 2008

I’ll stick with Apples colour picker thanks,
more powerful and better written than anything could ever be in Flash.
Oh and extendable too (e.g http://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/ )[Please tell me what you can do via the Apple picker (which, by the way, you can use inside Photoshop) that you can’t do via SWF panels, and vice versa. For example, tell me some specific limitations to using SWF & we can discuss those as part of the pro/con argument. Er, wait, I’m sorry–do you know any details at all? (Don’t let that hold you back, though.) –J.]
Screw Flash panels and screw everything they stand for.[Yes, screw community enablement, quicker feature development, greater flexibility for customers, more shared code/consistent implementations across products, and all that. Screw Configurator. Screw us all to hell. –J.]
They should have stayed in Fireworks and been buried with it.
I find it upsetting that garbage like thishttp://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/63716875/fireworks-words-escape-me-for-this-crapfest
could be considered a great idea for the Photoshop dev team, they clearly have never even used their own product range to find out how shit Flash is when used this way.[So, you don’t like a particular panel that’s in Fireworks (and not in Photoshop), and that means that all SWF panels are bad, and that the technology is “shit”? Faultless logic, man. –J.]
Why couldn’t you have just used Javascript or Lua to build custom panels using photoshops own control set?[Please describe how that would be better.One can write bad UI using any technology. Writing good UI requires skill plus technology. Flash panel support isn’t a magic bullet; nothing is (a point I keep having to make to those who think Cocoa is some kind of wonder drug). Flash does open a lot of doors, however, and Anastasiy’s panel is a great example of that. We’ll see many more to come. –J.]

Just add a color picker and we’ll be set! Don’t know if that’s possible to do or not though? Great job, I applaude Anastasiy for even making this thing!

jimhere — 8:52 AM on December 17, 2008

I praised Anastasiy’s color panel last month. I still say you should pay him a licensing fee and just use it rather than have the PS team do it over.
(also, take it easy on the 8-year-old comments — you can’t be Adobe CEO by 2015 with that kind of post!)

I think you’re misconstruing the comments. No one doubted that Flash is, well, “turing-complete” for lack of a better word. I think the frustration in both of the comments were at the lack of a native look and feel. It may be hard for CS4 to do ‘native’, but it is by design impossible for Flash panels to do ‘native’. As a “sign of faith”, it was a step in the wrong direction, away from native instead of towards. This is what gets people up in arms.
CS4 now does its own thing and the way in which it’s executed makes it feel better (to me) than having a crappy implementation of the native look and feel. The surprising thing is that even with all that, the Flash panels still look *nothing* like the native CS4 panels. It’s a custom look inside a custom look. This bugs me tremendously — these two choices should have made internal consistency easy.[I hear what you’re saying, and I agree that there’s room for improvement. The current Flash panel implementation has some limitations that make complete consistency more challenging than it might seem. For example, you can’t include native popup menus or other elements that extend beyond the bounds of the panel.We have the task of lifting those limits on the roadmap, but it was out of scope for this rev. On the other hand, we paid close attention to addressing some of the inconsistencies–e.g. missing scrollwheel support–that marred previous Flash panel implementations. –J.]
(Thanks, wolfpuncher, for plugging Hex Color Picker.)

I’m not a big fan of Flash since it’s a CPU hog and because it gets abused and overused in zillions of annoying ways on the web, but using it this way, to extend software in ways which might otherwise not have been possible, seems like a cool use for it. Meanwhile, I have been, and still am, using the Apple Color Picker in Photoshop because it allows me to save colors for use system-wide. Well, except for in those apps which don’t support the Apple Color Picker, of course (Adobe!).
One thing that bugs about this new Flash panel is that the CMYK fields don’t line up with the other fields. What’s up with that? It looks like a car bumper that got smacked out of position.

Let me emphasize how super handy it is to be able to store colors and re-use them all over the OS in various apps. Is there any chance of .swf panels working system-wide, or will they only work in the Adobe suite? Cause if it’s Adobe-only, it’s only half-useful to me. On the other hand, if .swf panels will eventually work system-wide, why the hell not just tap into the free built-in system Color Picker? Why all the redundant effort? The Apple Color Picker is great, flexible, resizable and extendable.
Yeah, I do realize that .swf panels are about more than color pickers, but their overall utility is greatly diminished if they only work in Adobe apps.

Ramón G Castañeda — 2:29 PM on December 17, 2008

Just a tiny bit buggy. The box on the right does not extend when the panel is resized, the Hex field remains hidden and one still has to use the scroll bar.
Also, the selection circle left by the arrow cursor is sometimes outside the color field.

I cannot stand when people resist innovation, get over it—try embracing it instead and seeing what it can do for you and praise other people for pushing the limits, that’s the mindset that keeps us all moving forward.

The surprising thing is that even with all that, the Flash panels still look *nothing* like the native CS4 panels.
I’d be all over this if it were true, but I’m in PS CS4 right now with the native Layers panel, Kuler and the .swf Color Picker side-by-side, and they look, well, exactly the same.

Toby Fairchild — 7:59 PM on December 17, 2008

One suggestion. My color color picker flash panel always opens in the ‘R’ mode of RGB rather than the ‘H’ mode of HSB that I would prefer. Is there a way to (now or in the future) fix this?

Making Photoshop “user” configurable via a scripting language is a wonderful idea. Think about how long Microsoft products have had VBA, a very long time, and it’s opened the door to all kinds of cool add-ons and specialized products Adobe would never consider doing.
Great work, and here’s to becoming wildly successful!

Mark — 9:33 AM on December 18, 2008

Personally, in Windows XP it seems fine, except… now it won’t open?!? I re-boot, still no color picker. It was fine yesterday and the files haven’t been moved or deleted from the Panels folder. I get all sorts of bugs in PS CS4, but they usually go away with a re-launch or re-boot. Not this time.

Sam Wilczak — 2:37 AM on December 19, 2008

Well I love them John, especially Deke’s new masking panel. Convenient stuff.
And to all the people who criticise the bleeding edge technology, you need to get a counsellor to get the anger out! LOL

Ramón G Castañeda –
Yeah, I’ll fix that soon.
Stay tuned.
Mark –
Try to kill the Panels/Colorpicker folder, then run Photoshop. Then exit it and unpack the files again, maybe in to some new folder this time, like Panels/Colorpicker2. Photoshop seems to store panel properties somewhere…
jimhere –
8)

Stan — 8:32 AM on December 26, 2008

I found this while trying to get a CMYK color picker to use from a script — the only color picker available from a PS script is the super-old RGB picker. Would anybody know if there’s a way to open this up in a modal dialog from a PS script?

Grant — 11:21 AM on December 26, 2008

John,
You should know better than to argue with narrow minded A**holes. These are the same people who whould vote for Bush again!!

Tom — 11:35 AM on August 07, 2009

I liked the Anastasiy’s colour picker fine when I was using it under XP. But now, using a fresh installation of Vista and CS4, it just seems to cause Photoshop to stop working and hang. :-(

I am having trouble with the color picker in FW CS4 Mac Snow Leopard: the picker appears 168px to the right from the click point. This happens in every Adobe color picker dialog (matte, line color, fill, etc). I have two monitors so it also shows up in the *other* monitor. If I have FW maximized in the rightmost monitor, the color picker appears outside the monitor (that is, I cannot use it).
A screenshot of this: http://www.mauriciogiraldo.com/img/colorpicker.png
I have tried resetting workspaces to no avail. What can I do to fix this?

I am having trouble with the color picker in FW CS4 Mac Snow Leopard: the picker appears 168px to the right from the click point. This happens in every Adobe color picker dialog (matte, line color, fill, etc). I have two monitors so it also shows up in the *other* monitor. If I have FW maximized in the rightmost monitor, the color picker appears outside the monitor (that is, I cannot use it).
A screenshot of this: http://www.mauriciogiraldo.com/img/colorpicker.png
I have tried resetting workspaces to no avail. What can I do to fix this?